The initial rate in 1866 for messages sent along the transatlantic cable was ten dollars a word, with a ten word minimum, meaning that a skilled workman of the day would have to set aside ten weeks’ salary in order to send a single message. As a practical matter, this limited cable use to governments (transmissions from the British and American governments had priority under the terms of their agreements with Field’s telegraph companies) and big businesses (who made up about 90 percent of telegraph traffic in the early years).
Businesses quickly turned to the use of commercial codes through which one word could convey an entire message. For example, the word “festival” as telegraphed by one fireworks manufacturer meant “a case of three mammoth torpedoes.” And for truly urgent information, price was considered no object: New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley spent $5,000 (over $65,000 in 2003 dollars) in 1870 to transmit one report about the Franco-Prussian War. During three months in 1867, the transatlantic cable sent 2,772 commercial messages, for a revenue that averaged $2,500 a day. But this represented just five percent of capacity, so the rate for sending a telegram was halved to $46.80 for ten words, a move which boosted daily revenue to $2,800.
Inflation calculators only go back to 1913 and 1914, but $100 back then would work out to somewhere between $2,500-$3,500 now.
Here are some messages sent
https://atlantic-cable.com/Article/1858Messages/index.htm
Also the first message was from Q Victoria to President Buchanan for laying the Transatlantic line.
Small change compared to what telecommunications carriers make these days
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Even if just for the stench of their unwashed bodies
And I thought it was bad when they used to charge per SMS text.
I’m going to need this translated into a cost per MB
What i wanna know is why they didn’t charge by character rather than word?
You can squish words into a single clump and still have the individual words easily discernable. So what stopped people from simply removing all the blank spaces from a sentence and calling it a single word?
If there was a maximum character count for what is considered a single word then you could still clump a few real words together into a single squished-together fake word, which would still save thousands of dollars.
Or did the words have to be actual words found in the dictionary? If that was the case then were people not able to use words that weren’t in the dictionary, like a company’s invented codename for a project they were working on?
Morse code has has a standard word length which happens to be represented by “PARIS”
Hah, if this happened nowadays you’d have to sign up for a $1000/month subscription for 100 words a month on a 5-year contract, pay a $35/word overage fee, and if you didn’t use all 100 words in a particular month, you could pay $5/word to roll over up to 10 of them to the next month. And if you try to cancel your subscription after those 5 years, they put you on hold for 3 hours and then accidentally hang up on you.
Also you have to cancel via transatlantic wire
